The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend: why animal advocates should help slaughterhouse workers

This title is purposely misleading: slaughterhouse workers aren’t the enemy, even if animal advocates often mistake them to be. I recently published this piece with Sentient Media, which I encourage you to read to get a full picture of what I discuss below. Doing the research for this article, I realized that a lot of people in animal advocacy, myself included, discuss welfare at slaughter without accounting for the welfare of slaughterers and other slaughterhouse workers. Frankly, while these workers have more power than nonhuman animals, they have very few resources available to them and thus, relatively little power to change their situation. And once they start the job, it seems to be a ticking time bomb to the wormhole of depression. Anyone that’s ever experienced depression knows how draining and isolating it is.

Currently, there are no EA organizations focusing on the well-being of slaughterhouse employees (otherwise known as meatworkers). EA orgs should consider slaughterhouse worker advocacy and support in their programs for a few reasons:

1) It overlaps with other animal welfare objectives: Line speed is frequently cited as a serious problem for animal welfare. It’s also one of the largest sources of physical injuries for workers. Given the lack of oversight in animal agriculture as a whole, I don’t know that efforts to reduce line speeds through pressuring governments or companies to change their policy will be effective. Empowering employees with support to leave these terrible jobs will allow them to fight back against the pressure to increase line speeds. It will also help employees to press for better wages, making animal products even more expensive (since reducing line speeds would make these products more expensive to begin with).

2) It’s a neglected area: While Mercy for Animals and the Rancher Advocacy Program offer support to farmers, Brave New Life Project is the only organization I found in the U.S. to support these workers, and they have an extremely small range of operations. I’m based in Canada, and I’m not aware of any organizations to support slaughterhouse workers here. The model of slaughterhouse recruitment means that workers are often immigrants whose families depend on them. That means that, in addition to needing mental and physical health supports to recover from their jobs, they may also experience barriers to recovery and their job search due to language barriers and inadequate access to family support services.

3) They have the same model: This isn’t based on extensive research, but while slaughterhouse workers themselves may come from diverse backgrounds, their suffering and difficulties seem pretty consistent across the board. Slaughterhouses have been getting away with manipulating and abusing their workforce for centuries without sufficient pressure to change for the better. As a result, there doesn’t seem to be much pressure on slaughterhouses to change their model. Therefore, a program adept at helping slaughterhouse workers to access supports, and one that creates supports for them, may be able to implement general supports effectively. If they require region-specific supports, the trends with slaughterhouse work can help identify regional partners. For example, violence against women increases dramatically with the level of slaughterhouse employment, so partnering with local domestic violence organizations could be insightful.

4) Partnering with workers could offer more access to information to support animal welfare and humanitarian campaigns: There’s very little research on slaughterhouse workers, in large part, because it is extremely difficult to get them to take part in research: they are afraid of losing their jobs and/or being deported. Research on the welfare of animals at slaughter is also affected by this. Even when researchers get inside slaughterhouses, data may (perhaps even often) be biased as workers are on their best behaviour. An organization with resources to support these workers could act as a bridge between workers and researchers, putting researchers in contact with workers who have just left their jobs or are considering leaving. The more data we have on these workers, the more conversation we can generate about them, and the more organizations and governments may step up to the plate to support them.